The transition team for US president-elect Donald Trump has announced that former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani will advise the incoming administration on how to secure America's digital infrastructure.
We're told that the Donald may hold meetings with senior private industry executives with experience in online security. …

Deeply interesting times

First, and this is the really crucial part, there is more than enough here [in the CNN-alleged Trumpdump / golden shower kompromat] to impeach Trump on numerous grounds both political and legal. Let me repeat again – this is an attempt at removing Donald Trump from the White House. This is a political coup d’etat....

All of the above further confirms to me what I have been saying over the past weeks: if Trump ever makes it into the White House (I write ‘if’ because I think that the Neocons are perfectly capable of assassinating him), his first priority should be to ruthlessly crack down as hard as he legally can against those in the US “deep state” (which very much includes the media) who have now declared war on him. I am sorry to say that, but it will be either him or them – one of the parties here will be crushed.

[Sidebar: to those who wonder what I mean by “crackdown” I will summarize here what I wrote elsewhere: the best way to do that is to nominate a hyper-loyal and determined FBI director and instruct him to go after all the enemies of Trump by investigating them on charge of corruption, abuse of power, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and all the other types of behavior which have gone on forever in Congress, the intelligence community, the banking world and the media. Deal with the Neocons like Putin did with the Russian oligarchs or how the USA dealt with Al Capone – get them on tax evasion. There is no need to open Gulags or shoot people when you can get them all on what is their normal daily behavior :-)]

...Because Rudy Guliani is already famous for his technical understanding of the internet and associated security and IT issues? Yeah somehow I don't think so.

I'll bet that he's just another one of those clueless government muppets that think "the interweb is like a bunch of tubes" and if you put the word "cyber" before everything you'll sound cool and smart.

If you look back over the decades, this is how things work... or don't work. They get the guy they want and if he's clueless, he learns buzzwords. I suspect it's not just here in the US but other countries as well.

Re: Giuliani - could have been worse

At least in the US when they vote one lot out,the whole lotmost appointees are let go; you're not left with all of the same appointed civil servants with the same bad ideas, though the career civil servants are left in place to run things while the political side gets sorted.

Wow, that is some amateur-hour stuff right there. Looks like they probably hired some guy's kid to set it up because "they know computers" who then proceeded to the grab some pre-built Linux distro with an email server and Joomla pre-installed and configured through some piece-of-crap 'Wizard'.

Given that absolutely nothing is blocked, I have the feeling that the firewall was disabled and the only reason why ports are showing as 'closed' is that there is nothing actually running on those ports.

I doubt that the machine is actually being used as a Honey Pot since several high-number ports that are very rarely attacked are open while some well-known and frequently attacked ports aren't.

"probably hired some guy's kid to set it up because "they know computers" who then proceeded to the grab some pre-built Linux distro with an email server and Joomla pre-installed and configured through some piece-of-crap 'Wizard'."

Reportedly it's a freeBSD machine.

More likely it was set up with the latest versions of stuff at he time, but RG isn't clued up enough to pay someone to apply updates/new versions as they come out, or even periodically.

No, a 400 pound guy sitting in a bed somewhere is going to pay for it. Why should the Russians pay for it, when good ol Vlad said he didn't hack us. His word is good enough for Donald, so its good enough for me!

I doubt his company actually does anything

Given Rudy's reputation, I wouldn't be surprised at all if it turned out that his security firm doesn't actually do anything but is rather just a front for accepting bribes and kick-backs from deals he made as Mayor.

I also would be quite open to believing that the only reason Rudy was hired was that Rudy gave Trump some building permits or selected his hotels as for city-sponsored activities and is now looking to collect on the kick-backs he is owed...

Re: I doubt his company actually does anything

A certain developer lately much in the news did not just use his "juice" with the building department to move his own projects forward and hold competitors back. He also leveraged his cordial relationship with the leadership of several construction unions. One has to wonder if the IT security folks from some of these "family businesses" would be a better choice. They are, after all, adept in keeping the FBI out of their systems.